


i'm your stranger on neon roads

by copperiisulfate



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4536624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/pseuds/copperiisulfate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anger is transcendent, someone told you once; maybe it was in another life. You don’t always remember so well. </p><p>So is this, whatever it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm your stranger on neon roads

**Author's Note:**

> multiple reincarnations AU in the vein of _25 lives_ by tongari/lalage. title from _moths_ by racing glaciers.

 

Sometimes, it’s on a summer afternoon on a cross-street, or a winter night by a frozen lake. 

Once, it was a spring evening, fireworks on a hill. 

Sometimes, you’re tired, not so quick to realize it, have to squint a little harder. 

Sometimes, your eyes are better, and you don’t need the glasses; another time, you lack sight altogether, and you worry you’ll miss him, if not for his hands, the sound of his voice.

Sometimes, you’re angry--no, you’re always angry. Anger is transcendent, someone told you once; maybe it was in another life. You don’t always remember so well.

Anger is transcendent. Trauma is transcendent. So is this, whatever it is.

 

*

 

Sometimes, he is sorry. 

Mostly, he is not. He’s not exactly callous about it, not every time at least, although those times exist as well and make you hate him a little more than the usual, but they are perhaps the exception rather than the rule.

Sometimes, you forgive him. 

Sometimes, you want to kill him ( _again_ , and this time and that time and that other time, you swear you’ll _mean it._

Once, he laughs when you tell him this, takes your hands and puts them around his neck and laughs and laughs and laughs. 

 _Do it_ , he says, once, twice, more times than you can keep track of.)  

Usually, he is insufferable. Strangely, you find it easier when he is because this, you can work with, are practiced with. 

It’s when he’s warm that you feel off-kilter. It’s when he’s thoughtful and kind and when he legitimately _tries_ that something feels awry and you’re certain that you’re _fucked_.

 

*

 

He doesn’t smoke always. 

Sometimes, he’s born sickly and angry about it until he isn’t, until he accepts that he’s meant to die young (again), or younger at any rate. 

It never gets easier.

After that, you find that you prefer him angry.

Sometimes, he has to watch you die instead.

You find you like that a great deal more, aren’t quite sure if it’s because you’re still feeling vindictive.

( _Right_ , you remember. _Transcendent._ )

 

*

 

Sometimes, you’re certain it’s a curse more than anything. There’s blood under your fingernails and you’re fresh out from a week of detention, bordering on a week of suspension, and your father is disappointed and walking out of the principal’s office and keeps telling you to _stay away from that boy_  but you don’t know how to tell him that you’ve tried, you’ve tried so hard--have been trying for centuries, it feels like--but you _can’t._

_*_

There’s a version where he kisses you on a moving train and you don’t care who’s watching, don’t care that he’s turning you inside out, don’t care that you’ve missed your stop and the next three stops after. You don’t care that you’ll be late for your evening shift, don’t care about anything really. 

It’s a version where his hair is black, his eyes are brown. He’s got feathers tattooed on his wrist and he makes you feel like you’re dying every moment you’re with him, and every moment without.

 

* 

 

There’s another version where you meet in a club. Your hair’s cut too short on one side and he’s got a brow piercing and you yell bad jokes in his ear half the night right up until you leave the club. 

His mouth is scorching hot at the nape of your neck and it’s just _once_ and it’s _good_ and it’s _never ever ever again._

_*_

 

There’s one where you share a glance, you never speak, and that’s all there ever is. 

 

*

 

Sometimes, it’s good. Things don’t go wrong, or not as wrong as they could have gone. 

It’s never perfect, not that you expect perfect, don’t know what you’d even _do_ with perfect anyway, but it’s you and it’s him and it’s something that seems to function, and that’s so much further than so many of the other versions have managed to get anyway.

Sometimes, it takes him longer to remember. Other times, it’s you who seems to forget, to maybe repress it altogether. 

Perhaps there are lifetimes where you never managed to remember. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. There were probably lifetimes where you never met and you remembered, or you did meet but he never remembered, or you never met and neither of you remembered, but you like to think they were good ones anyway. 

Likely, there were other people too. You’re half certain there were. There had to have been, in between the rest of it, like sunlight filtering through the trees of your memory. 

You have difficulty remembering a lot about them, the people and the lifetimes, outside of the vaguest shadows of memory, dreamlike, often leaving you wondering if they were even real at all. 

Surely, you think that there had to have been more than this, more than you and more than him. 

 

*

 

(This is one of the better ones, you think, but it’s still early, maybe too early to tell.)

You’re at a wedding, a distant family friend’s, dragged here by your sister. You don’t know anyone here except for her and the groom, and so you keep busying yourself on your phone until the ceremony starts. 

At least this is the plan right up until you feel the air _change._

You look up and some more people have entered the the large room. 

A small crowd disperses and--

You feel yourself exhale. 

 _There you are_.  

In this life, you’re not quite certain but you think you had remembered him, abstractly anyway, as if there was something impending but you could not place it. It had been so long and you’d half thought you would end up going the whole way without it, talked yourself into being okay with it.

His hair is red again, his face a little more lined than you remember, and whether they are laughter or frown lines, you can’t quite guess just yet. Both of you are older than you were that time you killed him, much older than so many of the other times you’d met, perhaps too old for there to be much anger left in either of your bloodstreams now. 

_There you are, finally, and here we go all over again--_

just as another part of you says: _it’s too early, too early--_

but you’re already tucking your phone away into your pocket, already on your feet, heart hammering all the way to your throat just as he catches sight of you from across the room, and you know that look; you’d know that look anywhere.

 _There you are,_ it says.

And he smiles.

 


End file.
